Squashed Read Online Free

“come to check out the competition?”
    I hated it when he called me “Missy.” Cyril called every woman under seventy he met “Missy” because hewas bad at names. Actually, Cyril was bad at life in general.
    “Just passing through,” I lied, shoving Richard ahead of me.
    “Brought your spy with you, I see,” Cyril said, indicating Richard, who glared back. “Well, feast your eyes on it, Missy, and weep.”
    A man jumped in the truck and drove it a few yards away, revealing the pumpkin, the sight of which made me stop breathing. It was enormous, bigger and fuller than Max, with orange skin so bright it looked like it had been painted on. Knowing Cyril, it probably had been. It had a sign next to it that read BIG DADDY.
    “Whatcha think?” Cyril leered, wiping his hands on his filthy overalls.
    Richard hit me on the back to start me breathing again. I collected myself nice and cool. “You call that a pumpkin?” I said, mocking. Well, you should have seen Cyril’s face. It nearly caved in, and Richard swallowed a laugh so hard he was coughing and bent over just trying to control himself.
    Cyril rose to full 5’4” height and smacked down his oily hair, his eyes on fire. “I call that a
champeen
pumpkin, Missy,” he spat. “Better’n anything you’ve ever seen.”
    “Make some child a real nice jack-o’-lantern, Cyril,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
    I grabbed Richard, who had dropped his lunch all over the road from the laughing, and we ran off like little kids who had just rung some old codger’s doorbell for the fifteenth time.
    This wasn’t my normal approach with people, but Cyril had it coming, especially since he’d been sticking it to me ever since last year’s Harvest Fair, when hebeat me by 91.3 pounds. When he said, loud enough for the world to hear, that maybe I wasn’t ready to enter the adult growing competition and couldn’t they find him a more formidable opponent. Cyril didn’t say “formidable” because he didn’t use words more than six letters long. I was angry, let me tell you, but managed to act like a champion even though I’d lost.
    I learned this from Nana, who said that the way to continue the great Morgan family tradition of growing was to be a winner even when you came in last and wanted to curl up and die. It was up to me to carry the torch, since Dad had walked away from farming when he was twelve, never looking back, and his brother Bill had gone into commercial insurance in Sandusky after flunking out of Buckman’s College of Chiropractics and getting Sue Ann Gleason pregnant.
    Nana and I were cut from the same cloth. When my mother died, Nana bundled me up in her arms and made me her own. It was Nana who taught me how to grow pumpkins and stand up for what you believe in. “Got the easy part,” Nana always said, “growing you in that good soil your mama already worked.”
    Dad stomped down his memories, but Nana never let me forget. On my thirteenth birthday Nana gave me what’s become my most special possession: the journal Mother wrote during the first four months of my life. The inside flap opens to a rose petal drawing, and underneath my mother wrote something that always makes me cry: “To my precious daughter, who will make the world a better place.” I hoped I would. Max and I are sure working on it.
    On those pages are all her thoughts about motherhood and how she loved it. She recorded when I moved my head and made important noises. She said I was anextremely intelligent baby who battled disease like a champion. She wrote about the high fever I had when I was three months old, how she and Dad took turns holding me in a cool shower to bring it down. There were photographs of Dad in an antler hat by the Christmas tree, of Mother putting a little crown of flowers on my bald head. The last page is dated April 3: “Going back to work tomorrow,” it reads. “Bringing Ellie with me.”
    She did, too. Brought me every day to Redmont’s Florist